It came with Windows XP, which ran okay. I tried hackintoshing it but it was too nerdy for me and Windows 7 came out in RC around then and I put that on it instead, which works great.  I’ve upgraded the RAM and the HD on it and one thing that’s nice about the machine is how easy it is to work on.

But lately I’ve been running Moblin on it and, after some jiggering to get the wireless working, I think I’m in love. Moblin is a new netbook operating system from the Linux Foundation that Novell is working on along with Intel. It’s based on Linux (Mobile + Linux = Moblin, see?) but the UI has been completely redesigned. It’s different than the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which is a version of Ubuntu designed for smaller screens; instead, Moblin is different, in the way that the iPhone UI is different than Mac OSX.

Moblin assumes you’re using your netbook for web browsing, checking email, maintaining a calendar, IM’ing, blogging, listening to music or watching videos — doing those social media things that the kids are all into. It’s a recognition that a 9″ screen is not suited for all desktop applications; they’re there, if you need them, but the new UI puts these other activities front and center and hides the others. It’s very well done and worth checking out.

I really think that these very small netbooks are a different category of thing; they’re not just small laptops. I have an old IBM Thinkpad x40 that I’ve used for many years now on consulting projects and it works fine as a real working computer. (Going back to it from the Dell is a revelation; the keyboard, especially, feels huge, which is absurd for a 13″ machine.) At netbook size, you need something different than a remixed desktop operating system, which is what Moblin aims to do.

Plus, these netbooks are cheap; at $200, I’ve started to wonder about using one as a Skype phone instead of buying another cordless phone system or trying to figure out how to use VOIP at home.  And there must be a lot of other uses for a cheap little netbook running Moblin besides DVD player and Skype phone.

This is good for nerds who want to impress their girlfriends* with portable versions of SLES on a USB stick.

It’s better for ISVs (independent software vendors) who want to create appliance versions of their applications

But, I think, it’s best for corporate IT shops that are looking to create a standard build environment for their technology infrastructure.  In Novell’s consulting organization, we have a popular core build [.pdf] offering, which does much the same thing, except with requirements gathering, security reviews, documentation, and all that complicated enterprise-y stuff.  Remember that a distribution is a kind of application marketplace, with more applications than you’ll ever need or want.  Enterprise IT usually wants less, if only for manageability and security concerns, which is why customers routinely hire Novell consulting to come and create custom versions of the distribution for them.

If they want to skip all that, this tool (screencast) allows them to create their own core builds and what we call ‘personalities’ on top of the core build — a personality for a database server will be different than a personality for a web server, for example, but the core build underneath will be the same.

Corporate IT teams can use it at the end of a regular build process to create blessed workloads consisting of “JeOS” (just enough operating system) + personality + custom or packaged applications.  These can be XML config files, .iso images, VMs, or AMIs for deployment to Amazon’s cloud services.  The deployment is just a checkbox option; pretty cool.

*  (You must be new here.)

I don’t know what the answer is for the newspaper industry, but between the film and music industries, they seem to have plenty of examples to choose from.  I’m a hardcore seven-days-a-week, tossed-on-my-doorstep New York Times reader, and I have been since time immemorial.  I’d like to see the paper option continue but I recognize the limitations.   There is real value in journalism and I’m willing to pay for it; as just one example, see their coverage of Afghanistan lately; CJ Chivers and Carlotta Gall and David Sanger and the rest of them have to get paid somehow.

The textbook industry is another situation entirely, and much more interesting from my point of view.  I think the big opportunity is to change the idea of ‘textbook’ fundamentally; my idea would be that university professors would construct classes using whatever content  they need from whatever source is available.  Good teachers do this today and don’t rely on textbooks.  In the future, good teachers would continue to craft their own courses; the difference is that changing technology allows you to create custom ‘textbooks’ that can vary by each course.   I think it would be fair to charge for the design, but I don’t think that will happen; professors today routinely share course syllabi as a courtesy, although those are really just the outlines of a class.  With this new textbook model you could have everything together (or linked together) in one place.

The class, formerly known as the textbook, would include lecture outlines, related readings, bibliography, assignments, on-line components, collaboration, student submissions, photos, and so on — including, perhaps, components of the classic textbook narrative as the backbone.  Course designers would grab parts of other people’s classes and reuse them.   Cool things happen when you remove physical limits to knowledge; compare Wikipedia to old encyclopedias.   A startup, Flat World, is attempting to do something like this using open source content.

You wouldn’t have to require that students have something like the new rumored Kindle, but if the professor was going to review the textbook in class they would have to have *something* to look at — either the paper edition, or a device like this rumored new Kindle.

But I don’t see the device as much of an obstacle; there’s already a free Kindle application for iPhone, for example, so I could just use my phone in a pinch.  And there are tons of other devices that exist or are coming out that can do similar things: e.g., a small tablet computer running Android.  That’s the sort of thing that if it’s successful will be knocked off in Shenzhen within a month and the cost will plummet — the only real cost is in the simple hardware, so you could easily imagine these for $150 or less, in the range of impulse buys even for college students.

I really like the looks of Samsung’s e-book reader, which has a nice soft, non-tech look to it; partly that’s because of the display, which uses monochromatic ‘e-ink,’ not LED.  E-ink also has the advantage of being much less power-hungry so you can use the e-books for days without recharging the batteries.  There are many others on the way, including two student prototypes and Fujitsu’s color e-ink offering.

Here’s the “Statement of Fork,” really one of the best names for a web page that I can imagine:

As of October 27th 2008, ‘TWiki’ is no longer the same – it is now commercial open source. The people that have driven TWiki development for the past decade feel the time has come to do so under a different name.

The new project, promises new features that have been long-awaited while maintaining a clear upgrade path for existing installations. The name is as of yet undecided, nextwiki, twikifork and notwiki are just placeholders.

The new project will be a true open-source project, not only in the sense that source code will be published under the GPL license, but aiming at a democratic governance free of commercial influence and trademark issues.

The nerds, he says, will answer Ubuntu; it has street cred on the Interwebs.  (I hasten to add that that includes me: I’m running Xubuntu on an old laptop and it’s great, ideal for its purpose.)

But  for small to medium sized businesses lacking nerds, the real answer, he says is Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

And why, you may ask?  Well, in a word: services!

In particular, if I don’t really know Linux that well and I’m running an SMB, I want a company that can offer me the full support package. That’s more than just 24×7 phone support. Both Canonical and Novell offer that. Novell also offers other support options such as certification, training, consulting, and even retaining the services of an engineer.

Well, you’ve done this before, they say, you’re grizzled veterans of the data center; is it two or ten hours for a server?  And the consultant — and I’ve been in this situation, believe me, it sucks — has to say, “Well, it depends.  It could be a thousand hours.”  Which is what everyone is expecting him to say because you can’t get a straight answer out of a consultant.  They’re always going to tell you “it depends.”  Right.

And even if there is all the time in the world, this particular answer needs to be in writing on the buyer’s desk by EOD today or the sales guy isn’t going to make his number for the quarter which means that he’s not going to make ‘club’ (his incentive travel event), which his wife is really looking forward to, so this damned consultant is not only not answering a simple, reasonable question from the beloved customer but they are also very directly making his wife mad at him, with the attendant consequences.

Perhaps you think I joke?  Or exaggerate?

Making matters worse, some nerd named Chad has downloaded OpenSUSE onto a machine in their testing lab and moved a couple of apps without incident (some directory changes, a few lines of code) and based on that experience has estimated that moving the three hundred servers will take approximately an hour each.  Seriously: we have clients who want us to tell them that moving unknown production workloads from one operating system to another will take less than two hours per server.

So the consultant sighs and starts to ask questions: What do the workloads on these servers actually do?  Online banking is different from warehouse management.  What platforms are they running?  (What version of J2EE?  What version of RHEL?  What version of Manugistics?)  Are they going to change anything else besides the operating system when they do this move?  Is the software custom or off-the-shelf?  What’s it written in?  If they say something like current Java apps running on a 2.6 kernel going to the same JVM on another distribution, that would be one thing.  If you are looking at non-ANSI C custom code on RHEL 3 on a complex multi-tiered app, that’s something else.  (Moving from the 2.4 kernel to the 2.6 kernel on any distribution is much harder than moving from one current distribution to another.)  What about storage, and backup, and disaster recovery?  Systems management?  There are a thousand more architectural details that you need to understand (one data center or many?  resource utilization?) but everyone is getting impatient with you and your endless questions.

Then you start getting into the enterprise-y aspects, which is where the real time and cost come in.  There’s a difference between Chad moving an app from one platform to another as a technical exercise and the actual time that it takes production applications to go from one to another.  What’s the testing regime?  I would expect that production code moving from one distribution to another would require real testing (stress/performance, UAT, etc.).  Would you include that in the estimate?  What about security?  Does the new OS have to go through a security audit at the company?  (Answer: yes, and it’s going to take a long time for the online banking app, believe me.)  Documentation?

This is all super-boring and bureaucratic and definitely not technical so the nerds aren’t interested and think it’s worthless and the sales guy is hearing his wife screaming at him and the buyer is saying, “Why is this so complicated?”

So, should we skip the backup part?

Really, the way to do this kind of thing is to do a quick assessment and figure out some kind of prioritization and rough sequencing, but that would require the client to spend time and money helping you to figure out how much to charge them and they are naturally leery of such a thing.  You desperately want to avoid getting locked into a fixed figure because you still have no real idea how complex the problem your being asked to solve is, but that is what the client and the others are asking for.

So you end up with a fudge; you commit to moving some edge servers and a cluster of supposedly simple apps and you sign up to do a security-approved core build and an assessment for the rest so that the project can get started and the customer can show progress to their boss and the sales guy can make his number.

Now you’re faced with months in the lab at the client site with Chad explaining to you how completely screwed up their environment is and how there’s no way that he’s going to give up his Solaris servers and anyway they’ve tried to do this themselves a bunch of times already and it never works because it’s not really a current release of Manugistics and they did some customization that they probably shouldn’t have…

Everyone who runs a large data center is today faced with the same set of interconnected environmental problems; space, power, and heating/cooling. And these are environmental not just in the sense of tree-hugging but also in a straightforward practical sense: there is no more space, there is no more power, there is too much heat and not enough cooling. These problems were the domain of junior people a few years ago, worrying about where, physically, to locate all the new Windows boxes. Then it was middle managers trying to sort out power and HVAC issues: “If we deploy a new phone system in our building we won’t have enough power to do any upgrades in the data center,” that sort of thing. Now environmental issues are front-and-center for senior IT management and if you’re a “red-shift” kind of company, for senior corporate leadership too.

You can cloak it if you want to in green terms but businesses are faced with real operational issues that they need to address regardless of their perspective on global warming or riverine dolphins.

Alongside these environmental issues, data centers are also facing a crisis of manageability. A large enterprise data center is a staggeringly complex thing, too complicated. Also, if the truth be told, most of them are not that well run; would you expect, for example, that an auto parts distributor would have great technology management skills? No, of course not, and the fact is that they probably wouldn’t want to spend the money to acquire that talent and technology even in they could; their differentiation, the competitive advantage of their business, lies elsewhere. So they have a complicated, and sub-optimized, technology infrastructure.

The answer to all of these problems — Monday edition — supposedly lies in virtualization. Novell gets brought into these conversations because inevitably data center managers have a roadmap that looks something like this:

1. Simplify and Standardize

The operations guys, who run the apps once they’re written, are finally getting the teeth to enforce common standards on the development side of the house. This is a political process as much as anything else, but it’s as hard as any technical issue, something that nerds are woefully bad at understanding.

What are the preferred options for operating systems? For databases? For Java platforms? For development languages? And so forth. The answers don’t matter so much as the fact that there are only one or two of them. Some shops use the model of Legacy/Supported/Preferred/Emerging, where Legacy is bad, Supported is headed to Legacy, and Emerging is headed to Preferred. So, for example you might say that Oracle and SQLServer are your preferred databases, while DB2 is supported (reluctantly) for a particular reason. Sybase, let’s say, is around still in the environment but it’s Legacy and thus unsupported: if you have problems with it, don’t come crying to Ops about it. Emerging would be MySQL and that sound you heard after the Sun acquisition was ten thousand infrastructure architects moving MySQL from the Emerging category to Preferred.

One of the key elements here is Linux. Data centers in the future are going to run Windows, in some form or another, and Linux. That’s it. Now, that’s going to take a long time, since we know that IT is conservative, and there will still be Solaris and VMS and so on in the data center of the future, but that’s not where the action is. It’s going to be Linux and Windows. But, as we’ll see, that may not make so much of a difference.

2. Consolidate and Virtualize

So once we’ve started to enforce rules on the heterogeneous chaos, we can begin to take advantage of that consistency. We’ve probably already got a SAN and perhaps an Oracle RAC environment (in addition to all those single instance databases), so the idea of virtualized pools of IT resources is not a new idea to our customers out in the business units. And it isn’t a new idea for sure for the mainframe guys, who are laughing their asses off, inside of their oxygen tents.

So now we start to consolidate servers through virtualization, inevitably beginning with the development and testing environments. You give the developers standard virtual machines to work on and then, magically, they’re going to migrate — after proper testing, mind you, we do have our dignity — into virtual production environments. At the same time, there is more likely than not a server consolidation project going on to move single servers into virtualized environments. Ten:1 or even 20:1 is common in production environments.

All that virtualization creates management headaches of its own; for infrastructure software vendors like Novell, the game is going to play out not at the level of the hypervisor — which is going to commodity status before reaching general availability — but at the level of the management tools. That’s what people will pay for.

Virtualization is not as easy as I’m making it out here; properly configuring hardware, for instance, is not yet straightforward and the performance hits on mis-configured hardware can be significant. Memory is king in the hardware for virtualization, and blades don’t seem to cut it because of their I/O and other physical constraints, so lots of shops looking at virtualization are re-thinking their blade investments that are just a few years old.

Even if you get that and the management of virtualization under control, you still have the basic architectural design of your virtualized data center to consider: is every application going to run its own virtualized stack? What about single apps on single physical servers? Are you still going to incur the hypervisor tax in that situation? Is the management & DR benefit worth it? And I’m ignoring the desktop side of things here but that is an other, huge, mess that you could virtualize.

3. Cloudify (? Cloudize? Cloudit?)

Let’s say that you’ve done all this and you’ve got a few standard platforms (Windows, database, Java, web server/LAMP, raw C++ for super-special stuff) that you’re supporting in your Preferred environment, plus some Supported and Legacy stuff that’s still lying around. For the most part, you’ve broken the tight linkage between the physical resources — the disks and the CPUs — and the abstract/digital ones, which means that you can now start to think about moving them around. Hedge funds might not want to put their algorithmic trading systems too far from Wall Street, but their HR systems don’t really need expensive Manhattan real estate, do they?

This also points to the fact that these infrastructure services are utility-like, as Nicholas Carr described in his readable The Big Switch. Java developers really should not care what operating system, or what hardware platform, or what storage system is running in the background. (They also shouldn’t care whether it’s WebLogic or WebSphere or JBoss but the fact that they do is another story.) You don’t care what operating system Google, or Bank of America’s website, or this blog, is using, do you?

Anecdotally, I’ve heard about corporate developers that have used Amazon’s pay-by-the sip service to develop apps without having to go through the laborious approvals process for infrastructure, and then the business sponsors of the application have said to just leave it there rather than moving it back ‘inside.’ But, as Nygard writes, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Amazon’s EC2 service — or EMC’s or Sun’s or Dell’s… — is going to suck up all of these virtualized enterprise machines, although that is one option. Another option is that enterprises are going to build their own clouds and host their platforms themselves. Again, the issues are not so much technical as political: no less real, just different.

The existence of the pay-by-the-sip services is, however, going to cast a harsh light on the value of corporate IT services. The business owners will be able to see, exactly, how much more they’re paying for supposedly secure inside-the-firewall services compared with out-in-the-wild services. And by services I mean computing/storage/etc.

4. Ongoing

So where is this all going? In a characteristically insightful piece, Tim Bray surveys the landscape and sees change all around — in programming languages, databases, desktops, and elsewhere. For instance, if you’re looking for the new Emerging-category database, Bray suggests Apache CouchDB, Amazon’s SimpleDB or Google’s BigTable. I don’t know if that’s right or not but he’s smarter than me. And this is what he has to say about the strategies to make money from all of these observations:

Business Models · Servers, they’re easy to understand. Blue-suited salesmen sell them to CIOs a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth at a time, they get loaded into data centers where they suck up too much power and HVAC.

Well, unless you’re gonna do your storage and compute and load-balancing and so on out in the cloud. Are you? The CIOs and data-center guys are wrestling this problem to the ground right now.

And as for software, used to be you shipped binaries on magnetic media and charged ’em a right-to-use license. Nope, nowadays it’s open-source and they download it for free and you charge them a support contract. Nope, that was last century; maybe the software’s all going to be out there in the cloud and you never download anything, just pay to use what’s there.

Personally, I don’t think any of those models are actually going to go away. But which works best where? The market’s working that out, right now.

For now, that seems to be just about the right answer to me.

I spoke recently with a guy worked at a VMS help desk twenty five years ago; he said that he’d recently run into some old colleagues from that time and asked them what they were doing. They said they were doing the same thing, VMS support, and that the team had pretty much stayed the same size, a couple of dozen people. IBM supposedly still has their own VMS help desk for their internal users. (You will recall that VMS is an old DEC operating system, an ancient enemy of IBM’s, so this is an admission not only that they use a competitor’s operating system but also, more to the point, that they can’t get off of it.)

My first consulting gig was at DEC, trying to get the remaining VAX/VMS customers to move over to VMS on Alpha. The challenge then, as now, was the lack of a business need to move: if payroll runs fine on their VAX, why on earth should they touch it, and risk missing payroll one week? I’d be willing to bet that some of those customers that I talked to then are still using their old VAX boxes.

Plus, it has to be said, that there’s a real issue with IT skills; a lot of people, as you would expect, are comfortable with what they know and deeply uncomfortable with the unknown. Any change represents a move into the unknown, where their skills and abilities may be less (or more, but different) than they are today.

At a current client of mine, their users are dependent on Kermit (remember that?) running on fully-fledged Windows PCs to telnet into a Unix (soon to be Linux) box. Why are they using Kermit instead of, say, Putty? Or Windows instead of a thin client? Or telnet instead of ssl? Because that’s what they’ve always done, that’s what their customers are used to, and that’s what they’re used to. Maybe they could change, but they’re not going to.

One factor, though, driving change within corporate IT is their users. Outside of Sun’s “redshift” customers (those using IT for competitive advantage — oil exploration, or web-based businesses, e.g.), most corporate IT departments are being directed from above to cut costs, not innovate. This dovetails nicely with the conservative instinct. But there is some evidence that people within large enterprises are simply bypassing their IT departments to get things done.

Forrester has a new report out entitled, “Embrace The Risks And Rewards Of Technology Populism” which argues that individuals are now driving technology adoption within enterprises. Much like the growth of personal computers in the 1980s, people are using new software tools, especially web-based tools, to do their jobs, regardless of what the IT department thinks of it. Read Write Web has a good piece, based on the Forrester report, that looks at the issue and discusses concerns around security, quality of service, and information silos.

There’s also an interesting Wall Street Journal interview with the CIO of Google, Douglas Merrill, who basically trusts his users to do the right thing and lets them manage their own ‘endpoints’ (PCs, laptops, mobile devices — things that connect to the network.)

WSJ: What’s driving the “consumerization” of tech in the enterprise, where companies are borrowing tech ideas from the consumer Internet?

Mr. Merrill: Fifteen years ago, enterprise technology was higher-quality than consumer technology. That’s not true anymore. It used to be that you used enterprise technology because you wanted uptime, security and speed. None of those things are as good in enterprise software anymore [as they are in some consumer software]. The biggest thing to ask is, “When consumer software is useful, how can I use it to get costs out of my environment?”

See also the discussion of this piece on Slashdot, the house organ of the sys admin.

All of this is forward-looking because today, enterprise web 2.0 is in its infancy. In the Forrester study, looking only at enterprise IT people who recognized the terms (I wonder how many didn’t?), respondents thought that only about 15% of their employees are currently using blogs / wikis / podcasts / RSS / social networking for business, not purely personal, purposes.

On the other hand, I’ve heard this meme about how kids today don’t use email — IM and MySpace are better — and so when they go to work in large companies, they will take their behavior with them. RRW quotes the Forrester study:

“For example, Adobe told Forrester that one of its European CIO customers required PlayStation support because the firm had a handful of Millennials who used PlayStations instead of PCs.”

I think that’s bullshit, honestly. But it is true that people — kids and adults — will do what is necessary to get their jobs done, and if the tools that IT offers aren’t adequate, they go outside for what they need:

“It might be that not only are the users more comfortable with the web apps they “grew up with,” it’s also possible that, despite their supposed tech-savviness, they don’t actually know how to use traditional enterprise software. Could it be that what the users actually “need” is training? Could they be turning to lightweight applications because they don’t truly grasp the complexities of or know how to use the software IT has provided? I would say that it’s more than possible.”

Yes! More than possible. The comments on the RRW piece are interesting because so many of them key in on this issue — how bad enterprise software is. And it’s true; I can barely figure out how to use Novell’s very expensive and newly deployed internal enterprise software: I’m intimidated by it and do everything I can to avoid it.

But what is conservative IT going to do about this usability issue? Again, a quote from a respondent in the Forrester study via RRW:

“We need to maintain a minimal and consistent software installation, containing programs which are commonly used throughout the business world. We do not have the time or resources to train and hand-hold new users to our company because they want to use Firefox, Google Docs, or whatever the next ‘Super Web 2.0 Ajax’ program is.”

Let’s unpack this quote a bit, since it’s full of nine kinds of suck. It reflects a common concern to ease the manageability burden by reducing variation and thus, supposedly, complexity, presumably for the desktop. Note that there’s no differentiation, no competitive advantage, implied in this; it’s either minimal or whatever is commonly used. But when users want something — not that Firefox is new, but *whatever* — they are resistant, supposedly because it’s so hard to learn and they don’t have the time to train them. My three year old daughter uses Firefox successfully and she’s only been recently potty-trained, so if your customers know enough not to crap in their pants, they can probably use Firefox.

Furthermore, their customers, their end users, are asking for it, and there are good technical and security reasons to use Firefox instead of Microsoft Internet Explorer. Firefox isn’t more expensive — it’s free, as in beer, damnit, as well as freedom — and it’s not somehow more difficult to administer than IE. They don’t want to let their users have Firefox because it represents change and something new, even though it’s obviously better and their users are requesting it.

Also, their list of web 2.0 ‘applications’ is telling; since when is Firefox, a web browser, a web 2.0 application? But the one that gets me is the ‘Super Web 2.0 Ajax’ program. That is their signal that they think this is all baloney and can’t be bothered to keep up with it, presumably because they are grizzled IT veterans and think that this whole web 2.0 thing — probably the web 1.0 thing for that matter — is a fad.

What we’re going to end up with, inevitably, is all of the above; silly ‘Super Web 2.0 Ajax’ applications alongside mainframe apps and everything else. And I bet when we look back on all of this twenty five years from now, there are still going to be VMS help desks.

Here’s some press coverage including the priceless hed “Novell focuses future strategy around endangered mongoose” from the UK edition of ZDNet.